Sunday, May 22, 2011

Pencils by me, vectors by Craig Parrillo. Featuring actual cloth for the towel, epoxy on the timer and goggles and gold foil for the medal and whistle. What's interesting, is that when we were first designing these, we really weren't too familiar with the type of product and weren't 100% sure what it would even look like when produced by the factory. We left it up to them to decide where the layering would take place and how the dimensionality would work. We did decide what would be epoxy and foiled, etc, but still there was a good degree of guesswork involved in how it would ultimately look. So, with that in mind, everything that was an element was vectored as if it would be recreated in print. However, as you can see, the towel, which was penciled and then vectored wound up just being a piece of actual cloth! That happened on at least one other sku, that I'll post soon. It was a cowboy one where I drew a very detailed rope, which was then carefully vectored, only to be replaced by the factory with an actual piece of rope!

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Pencils by me, vectors by Dan Fenelon. This one has lots of silver foil on the air pump, bike spokes and chrome parts and the lock. The helmet, water bottle and the air pump have a clear epoxy treatment on them.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Pencils and vectors by me, aside from Big Ben, which was vectored by Dan Fenelon. This one features gems for the bus' headlights and on the crown, gold foil on Big Ben and the crown, felt for the beefeater's hat and embossing and debossing on the faux coins. You can see on the original rough I placed actual photos of money that we were going to use, but we decided against it and went instead with the generic pound symbols on the coins.

Friday, May 13, 2011

I'm finally able to post some of the work I did last year at EK Success Brands, the scrapbooking and crafts company I've been working at for the last nine months. The first batch of dimensional stickers I designed, under the Recollections line, (sold exclusively at Michael's crafts stores) has just hit the shelves.

This was my first foray into work done for scrapbooking. I designed around 35 sets of stickers, for categories ranging from sports to school, travel and kids. Working along with me, was a terrific artist and muralist, Dan Fenelon, who designed another 10 or so. All told, there were 48 finished 'sku's' that we created, fully vectored and colored, from which only 13 were chosen to be produced. For my sku's, I did all the pencils, and some of the vectors, with Dan handling vectoring duties on a good portion. When it came to crunch time to get the program completed, another great artist who was working with us, Craig Parrillo, helped out on some of the vectors. I'll break it down as to who did what in the ensuing posts.

This is one of the first ones I did. For the vectors, I did everything, aside from the books and pencil cup, which Dan did. You can see from the photos that the actual stickers have depth, and are produced with different materials - foil, faux suede paper, gems, etc, to mimic real world textures and items. Pretty neat.
It was a bit difficult to photograph the packages because of the glare of the plastic bag, so you miss some of the details. For instance, the 'Back 2 School' logo at the bottom is printed in a sort of holographic mylar that shimmers when moved around. The lines on the color page pointing to objects are from the notes to the factory telling them what sort of techniques to use for those items. I couldn't locate the original vectors for this one (I only had a jpeg) to take them off.